Founding enigma.

Jefferson's Demons: Portrait of a Restless Mind, by Michael Knox Beran (Free Press, 265 pp., $25)

IN Thomas Jefferson, there is at once something and nothing for everyone. Conservatives share his fondness for a republic of yeoman farmers, but recoil at his contempt for religion and unseemly appetite for revolution, both born of an often doctrinaire Enlightenment rationalism. Liberals, who stand to find the most in Jefferson, nonetheless grimace at his belief in limited government, to say nothing of his hypocrisy (the seal of the vices, in their estimation). Michael Knox Beran all but ignores these easy oppositions in Jefferson's Demons--and grasps, instead, the genuine philosophical complexity of his subject.

We all know the Jefferson of "The Jefferson Bible": the cheerful empiricist, the sworn enemy of "every form of tyranny over the mind of man." Beran endeavors in this book to show a different Jefferson: the one who, almost in spite of himself, would harness the un-enlightened and un-rational to develop his enlightened, rationalist project.

Beran begins by identifying two human types, the "Whig" and the "Tory." Broadly speaking, the Whig stands for modernity and the Tory for pre-modernity. "In the Whig view," Beran writes, "people must take their politics, and even their religion and their private morality, much as they take their other household goods--by going to the marketplace and seeing what is on sale and at what price." The Tory, on the other hand, "pursues always his ideal of a society in which man's different endeavors--the long extent of his works and loves--can be made to form a coherent whole. [He] is an exile ... from the delicious intimacies of old Christendom."

In Beran's view, these two spirits--Whig and Tory--are alive in all of us who inhabit the modern world, but most especially in Jefferson. The Whig embodies the self-made man: the skeptic, the self-sufficient individualist. To him, the ties of family and inherited authority are so many fetters from which man must be delivered. The Tory, by contrast, recognizes obligations--to family, church, God, country--that he himself does not choose. He remains attached to these loyalties, taking comfort in what he has not himself created, and resists the modern Whig world, in which, amid an "infinity of choice" and a "superabundance of creeds ... the modern man must find his way."

Jefferson's Demons explains how Jefferson found his way. We witness his "muddy stretches," the intervals when he dwelt in darkness and shadows, distant in spirit and time from the radiance of 1776. It is in these darker episodes that Beran finds evidence for the central insight of this book: that, when Jefferson seemed paradoxical and conflicted, it was because his Whiggery could not express his most deeply felt ideals.

Beran explains, "It is a paradox of the Whig system that it cannot be built without a resort to the very materials it is supposed to render obsolete." In order to achieve his high Enlightenment aspirations, Jefferson would need to find a language more fertile than the lean idiom of rationalism--he would have to tap into the vast spiritual reservoir of the past: Greek myth, Protestant millennialism, Renaissance mysticism. "No more than other people," Beran writes, "could Jefferson live without those un-common trumpets, mystic and nonsensical, that bid a man rise from his moperies and act with an heroic creativity." Man cannot live on empiricism alone.

The mystical tuggings on Jefferson's brain were the ideas that he came across in his study of antiquity--and of the Protestant divines of his early years. When Jefferson wrote, for instance, that "the tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants," he was employing the imagery of ancient Greek fertility legends. At other times, he drew on what Beran calls the "poetry of Protestant salvation" to "reshape the mythology of the emerging American democracy." The vocabulary of the Puritans allowed Jefferson to speak of Americans as a chosen people, the light of the ages that would carry forward the rights of man. In a splendid discussion of Jefferson's 1801 inaugural address, Beran explores the speech's intellectual inspirations, among which was the Old Testament: "[America] was a second Israel, only more spacious, 'with room enough for our descendants to the thousandth and thousandth generation.' The president had seized from the Ephraimites their own high poetry and had annexed it to the cause of the emergent American nation-state."

Beran also demonstrates how the Enlightened Jefferson, who once asserted that the "earth belongs in usufruct to the living," the dead having "neither powers nor rights over it," was forced by personal tragedies to entertain a deep reverence for the departed. He buried five of his six children, his wife, and his favorite sister. Beran comments: "[Jefferson's] enlightened theories were unable to account for the feelings which these losses provoked in him. They did not even give him an adequate means of acknowledging the incomprehensibility of the horror." The ordered world of Deism, with its clockmaker God, could not explain the enormous fact of the human mind, with its joys and sufferings, its strivings and failings.

Readers of NATIONAL REVIEW are familiar with Beran's magniloquent prose. Jefferson's Demons brims with metaphor. This finery allows Beran to compass the intangible nature of his subject. At times, however, the reader wishes for a more concrete style, one that would help ground the enigmatic Jefferson. But perhaps Beran, who describes Jefferson's genius as "essentially poetic," could find no more apt way to discuss the author of the Declaration--a national poem, if such a thing exists--than through poetry itself.

Beran's style does allow him to make devastating assessments of Jefferson without seeming mean-spirited, as when he writes that the Jefferson presidency was "a triumph of style over substance. The president might have acted like a radical at the dinner table, but in his policy he was content merely to arrange the flowers." His governance was--despite the darkest fears of the Federalists--"cautious even to timidity." This description appears harsh, but it actually betokens Beran's admiration for Jefferson. During the hard-fought 1800 election, Jefferson promised that he would pursue a restrained, not a revolutionary, policy. He kept that promise. According to Beran, it was Jefferson's sincere Whiggishness--his belief in free thought and choice--that kept him from giving in to the visionary's temptation to impose progress on others. Though he admired the French Revolution--even as it turned foul--he could never import it to our shores. Beran writes: "When [Jefferson] reflected 'how difficult it is to move or inflect the great machine of society' and 'how impossible to advance the notions of a whole people suddenly to ideal right,' he became convinced, he said, of 'the wisdom of Solon's remark, that no more good must be attempted than the nation can bear.'"

These are wise words. We are indebted to Beran for his balanced and imaginative portrayal of a man who, despite baring the intricacies of his life and mind in over 18,000 letters, remains an enigma.